DESIGN AND BUILD The phone feels solid with a fair bit of weight to it but not too much as to hinder the usage. The size is of the phone, being a full touch screen phone, is pretty big but fits perfectly in my hand.
I believe the screen is made of glass so can break quite easily if you were to drop it onto something so it's best to protect it with some sort of case but overall, the device looks and feels well built.
SETTING UP First thing that needs doing after taking the phone out of the box, is the charge it as well as put in the SIM. Installing a SIM involves removing the SIM holder using a pin to poke a hole to eject the SIM holder from the top of the iPhone. This is new to me as all the phones I’ve owned in the past required me to remove the battery to slot in the SIM.
If you get it from a network shop, they’d be happy to do the initial set up for you but otherwise, you would need to activate the phone via Apple’s iTunes software, whilst connected to the Internet. You also set up an iTunes account, which is all pretty easy. Adding payment details lets you purchase ‘Apps’ and music from the iTunes store.
NAVIGATION AND USAGE The ability to navigate from menu to menu, push buttons, etc with gentle swipes and touches to the screen and the responsiveness of the phone is what drew me to the iPhone in the first place. The accelerometer, which lets the phone detect movement, means that I can rotate the phone and the picture will right itself. This is quite responsive although sometimes requires me to shake the phone before it does it. May have something to do with the angle I’m holding the phone at but it’s generally quite good. I like how rotating the phone when certain applications are open changes the view of the programs and sometimes gives me more options. E.g. with the built-in calculator open, rotating to a landscape view turns the calculator into a scientific calculator.
I really like the iPhone's abililty to let me access the Internet. It has the Safari web browser already built in for web browsing and I've found this to compatible with most websites I've tried to access unlike Internet Explorer on Windows phones! The double-tap to zoom in and using two fingers to control zooming in and out makes it really easy to use.
MULTIMEDIA The iPhone, doubles as an iPod and can play music as well as view videos and photos. All of this content needs to be ‘Sync’ed using iTunes, which is something I’ve never liked with iPods as I’d rather be able to drag and drop content into and out of the device. Even now, I find iTunes quite restricting and a little tricky to organise content but it works. Transferring videos to the iPhone is a bit trickier but once on there, video quality is very good. Music quality is also very good either using headphones (included) or using the speakers, which is fairly loud but no good in a noisy room. Something good is that the headphone socket is a standard 3.5mm headphone socket located on the top of the iPhone. Phones from other manufacturer’s like Sony Ericsson, Samsung, etc all seem to use their own connectors and they sockets aren’t even situated in convenient locations, especially when you have the phone in your pocket. i.e. Samsung Omnia’s socket for headphones is on the left hand side near the bottom.
CALLS AND TEXTING Making calls is easy enough and just involves pressing the ‘Phone’ button (after unlocking and returning to the main menu if you’re not there already). Once it appears, the keypad is large and very easy to dial. It also gives you some nice options like to do a conference call by adding other people into the conversation. With the speakerphone, people have commented that it sounded like I was “far away” during the conversation although It is still adequate as they still hear me fine.
Phone calls to companies that are picked up by their auto-attendants (i.e. press 1 for sales, 2 for customer service, 3 for whatever, etc) require you to press a number on the keypad for you to be diverted to the correct department. When I have the phone held up to my ear, the screen turns off but when I move it back down, the screen turns back on with the keypad visible so that I can press a number, which I find to be very user friendly. It also has voice dialling and the voice recognition if very accurate.
The QWERTY keyboard for texting is brilliant as the keys are large enough and the auto-correction for typos does all the corrections for you and usually gives you to correct work. The layout of text messages is laid out as conversations with speech bubbles. I really like this as the presentation is easy to decipher. Samsung tried to do something similar with message ‘threading’ but it was so confusing that I had to turn it off. Overall, texting with the iPhone is brilliant and I’ve found that I’m making fewer mistakes than I did with my old phone.
LG 32LH2000 – Simply a Beautiful piece of technology.
